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Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

Populism is the failure of compulsory education and the beginnings of the fall of the 20th century western nation-state. The system favours the more-popular over the objectively-superior, and the biased, ancient mass schooling makes that the rule instead of the exception. We'll have to abolish nations and any sort of tribalism---how sophisticated might it be---or it'll decay by itself hurting everybody until it disappears.

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So you're suggesting more indoctrination and the abolition of states aka. conquest and colonialism?

Because the way we're going, there's going to be another world war long before people willingly succumb to a global state...

I'm not suggesting those, nor am I suggesting anything at all. I just say what I think the reasons and the future trajectory is.

No need to be binary about the potential political changes. I only say that nation-states are bad, I din't say that states per se are bad.

Also, the next world war won't be before anything but the end of all of us. I didn't ever say anything about a global state, but what I think indeed is that, analogous to programming, state should be contained in the smallest possible context, that is, I think that smaller, more focused states with more direct democracy and with more (respective to today's nation-states) people that indeed share common values, would be more stable and peaceful. I know that such an idea will get many objections (even I do have my objections), but I believe such a political situation would be better for everyone.

It's happening already, although very subtle. For example some see Facebook as a digital nation. This is an interesting article from 2011 making this observation http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/the_rise_of_facebook_nation/

Perhaps 20th century western nation-states won't get totally abolished soon, but they'll see a lot more competition from virtual states in the near future!

There's no lack of education that makes people accept other people that don't share your values (like secularism) and are against what you stand for.

Unless by "education" you mean brainwashing, which is something totalitarian states excel at (horseshoe theory and all)

Nobody gives a damn about values. Otherwise the British nationalists wouldn't care about the Polish immigrant workers, but they do get a certain amount of hate.

Yes they do.

But there will always be racists who will dislike people for any petty reason

You can't abolish nations. Nations happen organically whenever people live together. They just differ in size.

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